~ The life of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the art of biography, and other things

Tag Archives: Paul Auster

WordPress daily prompt: Picture the one person in the world you really wish were reading your blog. Write her or him a letter.

Dear Paul Auster,

I know for a fact you won’t be reading this, and I highly suspect you dislike blogs. I think I read somewhere that you stay right away from the internet. Maybe that’s how you keep writing books. But pretend you were reading this, it would be written just for you.

It’s probably difficult to spot your influence on my fiction, but for a time I feel like I saw the whole world through your eyes. That was a decade ago, when I living in this same suburb I’ve just returned to. I wish my early twenties could have gone on forever, and I suspect you feel much the same. That was the period where I would be walking down the street and find strange letters on the footpath, photographs in parks. I used to spend a lot of time on buses and in the city centre, and seek after coincidences. I was MS Fogg, and I was Nashe.

(There you go, if you want to spot an influence, how about the ending of The Fur? I ripped that right out of Moon Palace, without even realising it. Our protagonists take a long, long walk across the country to complete their coming of age. MS Fogg walked further than Michael. Hey, how about that – Michael Sullivan = MS = MS Fogg – I never saw that before.)

I wonder what conclusions you’ve come to about God. It’s really not apparent from your writing, you know. But then again, I can never pick an atheist from their fiction.

I wonder if you ever feel like the gambler who won? You put everything in life on writing working out. You lived those hungry years on crusts of bread and translation work, were saved by the inheritance from your dead father, but more than that, were saved because of success and because of brilliance. What of those who stake everything on it and it doesn’t pay off?

You already answered that, I suppose, in The Music of Chance – you gamble everything and you lose, you might be imprisoned by some eccentric men and made to build a stone wall, and every time it seems you’re going to get free, your sentence stretches on further.

Anyway, I’m reading Winter Journal at the moment, when I should be reading other things for my thesis. I tried to appreciate every sentence as I read the first pages. A new book from a writer in his sixties: this will only happen so many more times. I really do dread the day you die. I remind myself how old you are every now and again – 65 and counting – and reassure myself that the odds are there’ll be quite a few more yet. But I was thinking Updike had another decade in him, and look what happened to him. I wanted another Rabbit book, I wanted them to go on forever – I’m sure he was thinking about it. On that note, more than anything, I need you to write about MS Fogg again – we learned about the fate of his friend, David Zimmer, but that feels like you were taunting me. Please tell me what happened to old MS!

You don’t know how obsessed I got thinking about the once chance I would have to speak to you – it was at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival, and I lined up with all the bookclub ladies in forty degree heat, and for months I’d been trying to come up with some one-liner which would make you want to be my friend. How pathetic! I got ten seconds in the end, and at least I got to tell you you are my favourite writer. I consoled myself afterwards with the knowledge that it’s probably better the way it is, with the friendship running one way only. It doesn’t get so messy this way.

It’s been a prolific decade for my favourite author, Paul Auster –he has just published his sixth novel of the noughties. As prolific as he’s been, he’s also published some of his weakest works –I don’t care for the crowd-pleasing Brooklyn Follies nor Travels in the Scriptorium, although at least they’re better than Timbuktu, his late nineties novel told through the eyes of a dog. I rate his new novel, Invisible, the second best of the six of the decade, after The Book of Illusions. It is the most typical of his whole career, with many of his recurring elements appearing – a mysterious stranger, a change of fortune, a struggling poet translating French texts, a random act of violence, and a framed narrative.

As almost always happens in Auster’s novels, the protagonist is a male New Yorker born in 1947 and a student at Columbia. Adam Walker is a college student and aspiring poet and the novel is about the defining year of his life, 1967.

Adam meets a mysterious stranger at a party – Rudolf Born – who makes him an offer that will change his life; Born will pay Adam to edit a literary magazine. Born is called away on business, and Adam is seduced by Born’s girlfriend, Margot. Yet it isn’t this that causes a rift between them, but Born’s violent stabbing of a mugger. Adam spends much of the rest of the novel hoping to see justice served on Born for the murder.

In between, he has lots of sex with his sister, and even though there’s been hints of incest in Auster’s work before (In The Country of Last Things, The Red Notebook, from memory) it is the sexual explicitness of this novel that is its most atypical feature. Usually Auster summarizes sex without going into much detail at all, but this time he is more anatomical.

Complicating the story is a complicated framing device. The first part about Walker meeting Born and things going wrong, is revealed to be the first chapter of a manuscript Walker has written in the present day and sent to his friend Jim, a famous writer. Walker is terminally ill and is trying to finish the memoir before he dies. (A situation which recalls Thomas Effing telling Fogg his life story in Moon Palace for his obituary, and Hector Mann bringing Zimmer to his ranch to see his secret films before he dies in The Book of Illusions.) After Jim’s framing, the second part of the novel is told in second person to overcome Walker’s writer’s block. The third part of the novel is filled out by Jim from Walker’s rough notes. As Walker’s narrative ends, Jim does some detective work, tracking down the people involved and trying to solve some of the mysteries.

It is a compulsively readable story, fascinating and littered with insights into the way we make meaning of life and how we decide what to do with ourselves. In her review, Lionel Shriver contended that there is nothing to take away from the book, that it’s like a glass of lemonade. I think part of what she is noticing and what disappoints her is an insistence by Auster that his narratives attempt to mimic some of the randomness of life, with both its coincidence and its failure to resolve. I read a reviewer once describe Auster’s work as a handful of smooth stones rubbing against each other, but not yielding anything as simple as meaning.

Perhaps Auster has had a bad influence on me over the last nine years that I’ve been reading him. Particularly in my first two novels and in an abandoned novel or two, I attempted to emulate his randomness, thinking I could just add it as one more element in a palimpsest of all my favourite writers – a bit of Auster’s randomness, a bit of Joyce’s stream of consciousness, a bit of Dick’s madness – in the one narrative. Not possible. The whole narrative world has to be driven by randomness, if one wants to write about the music of chance.

On Saturday night I saw The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, famous for being Heath Ledger’s final film. (Interestingly, to me at least, my cousin is married to his cousin.) I’m always disappointed by Terry Gilliam films – they promise a lot, have fascinating moments and concepts, but are undisciplined, unfocused. The struggling travelling caravan of the immortal Dr Parnassus making its way around London is fascinating and the strange worlds of people’s fantasies as they enter his mirror are enjoyable. Just don’t expect too much sense.

On Tuesday night I watched Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 film The Wrestler. I was underwhelmed. It’s a well directed, well acted drama about a washed up wrestler who has nothing to live for but his wrestling, with a parallel drawn between his physical performance in the ring and those of his stripper friend. It is strongly realist, in stark contrast to his other films, Pi, Requiem for a Dream and Fountain, all of which are surreal.

On Wednesday I read in The Australian Literary Review with great interest a writer I like a lot – Lionel Shriver – writing about my favourite writer, Paul Auster. She claims to know his work quite well, and praises him as a great storyteller. She puts her finger on one important quality of his work:

The word “readable” doesn’t do this quality justice. Auster has such a sweet, clear, inviting voice that his novels go down like lemonade. While his characters are vivid, his genius is plot, of which readers of literary fiction are too often starved.

But she thinks he falls short of Philip Roth; unlike Roth, one comes away from Auster – she contends – with an ‘absence of an intellectual, psychological or political souvenir’. His stories are just stories – no meat, just lemonade.

Hmmm. I think she’s wrong. At his best, Auster has a lot of psychological insight into the way we live our lives, the way we respond to choices and circumstances. His souvenirs – for me – are existential, clues to the conduct of life. A sense that someone else lives in the kind of world I live in. But I think I know what she means.

All through the week I’ve been reading Don Watson’s book about America. I’ve been dissatisfied, even a narrative like this is no substitute for reading a novel at the same time. (I had just given up on Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book; I found her prose too annoying, slipping between colloquial and formal, and the feel of popular fiction, with its cliches and a certain kind of first person voice.) I have been thinking about moving to nonfiction for my next book after the library novel. I think it may bring together the two sides of my personality/ interests better than fiction – the researcher in me. But it wouldn’t be the kind of book Watson is writing. It would be less personal, and not have opinions in it.

Watson’s is a rambling travelogue, beautifully written, that keeps recurring around the centrality of fundamentalist Christianity to the experience of living in America. I have an endless fascination and horror with fundamentalist Christianity, and so I find this interesting, all the things he hears on the radio and sees on the telly, all the signs he sees about Jesus. There’s a lot more to it, of course, it’s just as much about politics and history and travel.

(This is not the eagerly anticipated 3pm weekly post, but something I wrote in January and meant to turn into a long long piece before publishing. Think of it as your pre 3pm entree, but don’t get put off because it probably will mean little unless you’ve read any of Auster.)

The youthful quest for identity and meaning is literalised into the quest for survival and in doing so perhaps it resonates with my own romantic visions of being young and feeling alone in the world. The threat of starvation, living in a cave in Central Park, surviving by selling off secondhand books, the determination to do nothing all to save oneself – all exaggerated literalisations of my own early twenties, of being a student and then being unemployed for a time.

In relying on co-incidences as a major plot device and drawing meaning from parallels and intersections, Moon Palace seems to offer a fresh way of making sense of the world. Every narrative reduces the complexity of the world to a narrative logic of some order and coherence, but it’s the freshness of Auster which shines so brightly in this novel. Life seems full of the leaps and co-incidences and intersections out of which M.S. Fogg makes sense of life.

I love the way M.S. and Effing both give life meaning by setting themselves crazy projects. M.S. reading every book of Uncle Victor’s and in this way paying tribute to Victor’s life. Effing giving away to strangers the stolen money he found decades earlier. M.S. and Sol setting out to find the cave Effing hid in. I think reading this and echoes in other Auster’s works gave me a similar tendency from 2001 onwards.

(Moon Palace is my second favourite novel of all time. I just finished reading it for the third time and I wanted to write an outline of the novel for future reference and to help my own understanding. I hope to write another post exploring why it is so important to me.)

This story of how Marco Stanley Fogg’s life ‘began’ is told in first person; at one point he specifies that he’s writing in 1986, fifteen years after the narrative ends. We don’t learn anything of these intervening years save a single scene; it’s the first twenty-three years of M.S. Fogg’s life we learn about.

M.S. tells his childhood quickly, giving us summaries and a few brief incidents. When his mother is killed in a traffic accident, he is adopted by his Uncle Victor. Uncle Victor is a member of a band called the Moonmen and has a big influence on the young M.S.. He gets him thinking, gets him reading and teaches him that names have a power; they aren’t just co-incidental – the baseball player Glen Hobbie will never make it big, because his name implies amateurism; M.S.’s name itself carries much better significances – the explorers Marco Polo, Stanley Livingstone, Phileas Fogg. M.S. himself goes on to reflect on the initials M.S. which become his name and the idea of his life as a manuscript, a narrative in progress. When he heads to Columbia University, his uncle gives him his collection of 1492 books. The boxes form the furniture of M.S.’s apartment.

M.S. hasn’t finished university when news reaches him of his uncle’s death. Money was always going to be tight, but by the time he’s paid off Victor’s debts, he knows he is living on limited time, that he has to do something or he will not have the money to finish. And yet in an irrational act of quixotism, a kind of bravery or solitude or stubbornness, he decides to do nothing, to see what will happen to him.

His concession to his situation is to sell off his uncle’s books, but he reads each one before he sells it. Since the books were stacked chronologically, the sequence of titles resembles the sequence in which his uncle read them – except that the boxes themselves are not in order – and in doing so, he feels he relives his uncle’s life. (This might seem a small point, but it is the touches like this that are part of the brilliance of the novel for me.)

When he runs out of money, he goes to visit his friend David Zimmer (who, of course, reappears in Auster’s The Book of Illusions). Zimmer has moved on, but he bursts into a breakfast party held by the new tenants. They feed him; he eats ravenously and meets his ‘twin’ – Kitty Wu, who is wearing the same t-shirt as him.

Soon he is kicked out of his apartment. He goes to live in Central Park. He gets sick, holes up in a cave and is on the verge of death when Kitty and Zimmer finally find him. Kitty has been looking for him for some time; she never felt so sorry for anyone in her life, she tells him, than when she met him that one time at breakfast.

He recovers in Zimmer’s apartment for several months and is rejected for the Vietnam draft. Zimmer urges him to go and pursue Kitty; she’s in love with him and she’s waiting for him to make the next move. Kitty and M.S. become lovers, discovering in each other true soulmates.

M.S. needs money; he answers an advertisement and becomes a companion to one Thomas Effing, an elderly bad tempered man who is either blind or pretending to be blind. M.S. moves in to Effing’s house, leaving Zimmer behind. At this point Zimmer disappears from the narrative and M.S.’s life, which seems extraordinary – why didn’t Kitty and M.S. keep up with him, at least? In the only flash-forward, M.S. tells us that the only time he’s seen Zimmer since was four years ago, in 1982, when he saw him, his wife and kids walking down the street and stops and talks to him for twenty minutes.

(We don’t read about this incident in The Book of Illusions; the only link to M.S. we learn about in that novel is that one of Zimmer’s sons – who die soon after in a plane crash – is named Marco. Surely Zimmer would have told M.S.? I don’t think Auster had realised he was going to do this when he wrote Moon Palace; if only he could go back and adjust it.)

After some space devoted to the great love between M.S. and Kitty, Kitty moves out of focus for a chapter as M.S.’s adventures with Thomas Effing come to the fore. I make the mistake of picturing Effing as the Big Lebowski, the one in the wheel-chair, from the Coen brothers’ film, but this is wrong. Both are grumpy and insane, but Effing is a tragic figure as much as a comic one.

M.S. takes Effing for walks, and must describe the world to him, quickly and precisely, noticing all the details he has taken for granted. Then one day Effing declares he is going to die in two months and it’s time to get started on his obituary. Effing tells his life story, a story which parallels and resonates with M.S.’s. Effing was born Julian Barber in a wealthy family. He was a painter and disliked his ‘frigid’ wife. He sets off into the Utah wilderness with the heir of another rich family to paint the unique light. Their guide is unscrupulous and when the young heir falls down a ravine and is fatally injured, the guide refuses to stay with him or to take him back. Effing stays with him as he dies and then wonders what to do.

Fearing his name will be mud because of the death of the heir but perhaps also sensing the opportunity, Effing decides to not return, to stay out there in the wilderness. Just on the point of death, he finds a murdered hermit in a cave. He decides to take over the hermit’s life, and paints his best paintings ever, knowing that no-one will ever see them, painting them only for himself. He learns that the hermit was murdered by a gang of robbers and that the robbers will be back. When they return, he’s waiting for them, killing all three and taking their loot. Rich again, he heads back to civilisation, exiled from everyone he once knew and living under his new identity of ‘Thomas Effing’.

In time, he learns that he actually fathered a son the night before he left for Utah and he observes the man’s life from afar. His son’s name is Solomon Barber and he is a history academic.

His time nearly up, Effing wants to give away the original amount of money he took from the robbers. Despite his bad health, he forces M.S. to take him into the streets where they give away the money. On the last night, it’s pouring with rain but Effing insists on continuing and M.S. realises he is determined to die. Sure enough, he catches pneumonia and holds onto life only until two minutes past midnight on the day he had nominated as his day of death.

Effing leaves M.S. a sum of money and for a time Kitty and M.S. enjoy a blissful, carefree existence living together. M.S., meanwhile, writes to Solomon Barber, who is keen to meet M.S..

Sol realises as soon as he meets M.S. that M.S. is the son he didn’t know he had. While a professor he slept with M.S.’s mother – his nineteen year old student – in the morning they were discovered in bed together and the scandal caused Sol to be dismissed. She went back to her hometown and refused to speak to Sol again. Sol doesn’t tell M.S. any of this, figuring there is lots of time, that the right moment will come. He does, however, move to New York and become friends with M.S. and Kitty.

In the meantime, the bliss of M.S. and Kitty’s love is destroyed. Kitty gets pregnant; she wants an abortion and M.S. desperately wants the baby. M.S. frames it as his mistake, that he was foolish to be upset about her wanting the abortion. When he gives in and she has the abortion, something breaks in his heart. He can’t bear to be with her; he moves in with Sol for a ‘break’. Sol tries to get them back together; Kitty waits for M.S. to return – but he cannot.

(One can only speculate on Paul Auster behind the text here. And as much as I shouldn’t, I will. Perhaps like M.S., as an American liberal, he believes in his head that abortion is a necessary choice, not something to mourn. Yet perhaps he had an experience like M.S. where his heart felt it was a terrible thing and wouldn’t match his head.)

Sol hatches a plan to get M.S. out of his funk. They are going to find the cave in Utah where Effing lived for a time and hid his paintings. On the way, they stop to visit M.S.’s mother’s grave. Sol starts sobbing at the grave and reveals the truth to M.S.. M.S.’s first reaction is anger and Sol blinded by tears stumbles away, straight into an open grave. His back is broken and he spends weeks dying in the hospital, attended by M.S. day and night.

When Sol dies, M.S. rings Kitty; she’s the only one who might understand. She listens, and is sorry for him, but she won’t have him back. She has someone else; she says he nearly killed her and she’s had to harden her heart to survive. (As much as one might understand this, it’s actually only been three months since M.S. moved out; I can’t help thinking that the truest love would have waited longer than that.)

Having lost everyone, M.S. tries to find Effing’s cave. He finally discovers the area was flooded; all he can do is hire a boat and ride over the lake, knowing he is as close as he will get. When he returns, his car with his inheritance has been stolen. With just his wallet in his pocket, he starts walking. He walks all the way to the west coast, and when he gets there he stands in the Pacific Ocean watching the moon rise. And that’s the end of the story.

After finishing my favourite author’s latest novel, I’m not sure what I think of it. It’s a slim novel of insomnia as seventy-two year old August Brill reports two of his strategies of dealing with his failure to fall asleep. Brill is living in a house of three generations of mourning, having recently lost his wife, while his daughter Miriam has been abandoned by her husband and the boyfriend of his grand-daughter, Katya has been killed in Iraq.

Brill’s first strategy is to tell the story of Owen Brick, a man summoned from our world to fight a war in an alternate world where the north-eastern states do not accept George W. Bush’s victory in the 2000 election. There was no 9/11 in this world and there is no war in Iraq, but there is instead a second civil war. The nightmarish war-torn America is perhaps a self-parodying indictment against Brill (and Auster) and all the other progressives who are certain that everything would have turned out better if only Bush hadn’t been president.

The story arc of Owen Brick is an engrossing one. Piece by piece he comes to understand more of the alternate world as he tries to escape his mission to assassinate the author of the war : August Brill. These sections are reminiscent of Auster’s lyrical post-apocalypse, In the country of last things. But in an unsatisfying move, Brill extinguishes the story quite suddenly, before Brick has a chance to reach Brill’s own home and confront him.

It’s this sense of a half-finished narrative within the novel that leads me to think Man in the dark is most comparable with Auster’s 2004 novel Oracle night, where a similar thing happens. Both seem deliberately unsatisfying.

Brill’s second strategy is to tell Katya (who can’t sleep either) the story of his marriage. It is a fascinating story, with obtuse parallels to Owen Brick’s story. Brill can now bring the wisdom of seventy-two years to analyse the way he lived as a younger man and the painful mistakes he made:

I’ve thought about this for years, and the only half-reasonable explanation I’ve ever come up with is that there’s something wrong with me, a flaw in the mechanism, a damaged part gumming up the works. I’m not talking about moral weakness. I’m talking about my mind, my mental makeup. I’m somewhat better now, I think, the problem seemed to diminish as I grew older, but back then, at thirty-five, thirty-eight, forty, I walked around with a feeling that my life had never truly belonged to me, that I had never truly inhabited myself, that I had never been real. And because I wasn’t real, I didn’t understand the effect I had on others, the damage I could cause, the hurt I could inflict on the people who loved me. (153)

Brill’s story manages to put Katya to sleep, leaving him to reflect in the last few pages of the novel on the horror of Katya’s boyfriend’s death. Perhaps it’s the shocking horror of the details of this that are actually the animating force behind the rest of the novel and its much slower horrors.

The novel finishes with Brill telling Miriam that the poet she is writing about, Rose Hawthorne, had one (and only one) good line: As the weird world rolls on.

If it sounds like it doesn’t all hang together, that’s because it doesn’t. In this novel Auster presents life as a bundle of narratives, some true, some imagined, some complete, some incomplete and all of them held together by the rather fragile and diverse unity of a person’s mind. Beyond this, I don’t get it. But neither could I put it down.

It’s taken me four weeks, but I’ve reached the halfway point of Don DeLillo’s massive Underworld, and I feel I’ve been dragged across significant parts of the post-WW2 American psyche.

I’ve just read the chapter where Klara Sax and friends go to see the first ever screening of Eisentein’s newly discovered secret silent masterpiece, Unterwelt. (He shoots it secretly as he supposedly works on propaganda films for the Soviets. The idea of a secret film is compelling and I wonder if it inspired DeLillo’s friend, Paul Auster, to write Book Of Illusions, which centres on a fictional filmmaker’s secret films.)

I think he describes the experience of watching a film very well. Here’s some of it:

… images poured from the projection booth, patchy and dappled with age.

Of course the film was strange at first, elusive in its references and filled with baroque apparations and hard to adapt to – you wouldn’t want it any other way.

Overcomposed close-ups, momentous gesturing, actors trailing their immense bended shadows, and there was something to study in every frame, the camera placement, the shapes and planes and then the juxtaposed shots, the sense of rhythmic contradiction, it was all spaces and volumes, it was tempo, mass and stress.

In Eisenstein you note that the camera angle is a kind of dialectic. Arguments are raised and made, theories drift across the screen and instantly shatter – there’s a lot of opposition and conflict. (429)

DeLillo has immersed himself in the visual experience of film, and got to some of the beauty and experience and precisenss of it. This is something that I as a writer have not yet achieved. My flaw is to get bogged in plot.

Film is central to my new novel, The House of Zealots. At first I had a lengthy scene describing Fight Club as the housemates sit drunkenly watching it. The themes of Fight Club resonate with the housemates’ ambitions, particularly Leo. But at the suggestion of my editor, I broke it up, with scenes playing at different times in different chapters. I’m not sure if it works yet or not.

Later, Leo and Phoebe begin going to the cinema together, and it is where their awkward romance blossoms.

They get off in the city centre and walk over to the shabby Piccadilly Cinema. Memento starts and layer upon layer of memory unpeels on the screen as the amnesiac man keeps coming to. He can’t remember anything; can he trust the people around him?

The man reminds Phoebe of Leo. His loneliness, his intensity, his inability to relax. He has to get to the bottom of it all. Tears come into Phoebe’s eyes. She feels an urge to protect Leo. He’s next to her, breathing and thinking in his own head. They are seeing the same things and yet thinking and feeling different things. It’s so strange, she thinks, to watch a movie with someone.

Afterwards, they sit in the Art Deco foyer drinking complimentary tea. Staring into her cup, snatches of the film come back to her. They say nothing, letting the film sink in, allowing each other to return to the real world. She is glad he understands that, glad he cares enough that he goes into that film world too and needs time to come out of it. When she saw a film with Zac and Samantha, before the credits were even up Zac was saying to Samantha in his dominating voice, ‘What did you think of that?’

In the first draft of the sequel to The Fur, Michael finally gets to see a movie. (They don’t have much technology in his Western Australia.) It’s been cut from the subsequent draft, so here it is in its satirical and fictional failure, an attempt to create my own fictional film:

The novelty of moving pictures. The sound. The two connecting, if you allowed them to, if you didn’t think about it too much. Little people on a screen. It was something your grandparents were meant to describe in these awed terms, I understand, not someone born in the 1980s!
A black screen. A label comes up: SECRET AMERICAN MILITARY BASE IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN: TEST FLIGHT OF EXPERIMENTAL NEW MODEL. It is followed by initial credits fading in and out at the bottom of the screen. The music is a soft rock ballad. A young woman, Jules, with real attitude played by an actor – the cover told us – named Angelina Jolie is washing her face. She pops pain killers. She swears. She’s feeling off colour. The camera follows her as she races out the door. She’s in air force barracks. People run up behind her, remonstrating with her. She brushes them off. She goes through restricted areas to a room with technicians who strap gadgets on her back, a helmet on her head, communications equipment, her large breasts still showing through it all.

The credits stop. There is the huge rumble of her plane taking off. The screen goes black and then lights up in slimy green letters THE FUR, a pause, and then a second blast, WARRIORS appears.

The music goes heavier as she speeds over oceans, camera goes from her face to a shot of the plane from the side to front on, to the pilot’s view. The ocean gives way to land. An Australian wheat farmer looks up and points at the aircraft. It passes over Uluru.

She’s sweating. She’s sick again. She tries to regain her composure.
Cut to an evil looking woman, Anna, in a colonel’s uniform rubbing her hands in glee. She has a photo of Jules in a handsome man’s arms. She tears the photo.

Switch to aircraft. Something is very loose. Jules radios for help. The plane is out of control.
Try not to crash in Western Australia! the base told her. Try not to crash in Western Australia.

She crashes in Western Australia. She passes out. Time lapse photography, night going over the desert crash scene, huge fur plumes looking more like slimy cactuses. She comes to. Two furry men are shaking her awake. She screams and pushes them away. They knock her out with a club. Drag her back to the camp.

And then she sits enthroned amongst the savages. Some of them think she is a god. The huts are made out of road-signs, dewheeled cars and trucks, corrugated iron, all tied together with great ropes of fur.

Next we have a montage as the goddess from the sky shows the savages all sorts of wonders – she works on the car they have, trying to get it to work; she uses a can opener to open cans of food; the shooting of the guns they have stacked up in a hut; the fact that the trucks passing on the highway are not demons or anything of the kind but trucks; she has another go on the car and this time gets it to lurch forward a bit; she shows them how to plant vegetables so that they don’t just live on mushrooms and roo meat; and at last triumphantly as the music fades out she gets the car to work.

Cut back to the secret United States air base in the Pacific Ocean. The man we saw in the photo with Jules is Hank and he’s very upset. Anna tries to comfort him but without any success. Her evil plan is backfiring.
‘I’m going in!’ he shouts, ‘I’m going in to find her if it’s the last thing I do!’

He steals a plane from the runway and flies it over the Pacific Ocean across Australia – the same wheat farmer looking up astonished – to roughly where Jules was last heard from.
Cut to shots of the Wealth Compound, a veritable palace of wonders, and behind its panelled doors, torture dungeons to make every civil libertarian shudder. Scavengers strung up and beaten; howling in filthy conditions at the smartly dressed evil looking guards.

Pan back out to the Compound Palace. Once again UN Human Rights Inspectors are denied access to the prisons by an overweight, heavily accented Australian named Barry.

I stopped following it so closely about here, my attention wandered and you’ve probably already seen it anyway. But basically, he eventually finds Jules and her tribe and together they launch an attack on the Compound and free the prisoners. The closing scene has Jules and Hank hugging as they fly the plane back toward the USA, Hank joking that he’d kill for a cheeseburger and some civilisation.
I decided I didn’t like America much at that moment.
We sort of missed out on the popular cultural imperialism of America, living here in Western Australia – or we have in the past. But things are changing. Soon we will be as American as the rest of Australia and the world.

And the thing is, I caught more of a glimpse in that movie that the enemy wasn’t just the Wealth and Warriors, that there were bigger players involved. Now, three years later, I can finally recognise that to most of the world the Commonwealth of Australia was only a minor novelty of injustice; that the bully to be feared was the US of A, even though growing up they had been nominally on the side of us Western Australians. It makes me look back on myself as provincial, so naive.

David Zimmer’s life collapses when his two sons and his wife die in a plane crash. He finds, if not meaning, then at least something to do, by writing a book about the silent films of forgotten star, Hector Mann. Hector Mann disappeared mysteriously in the 1930s, and is presumed long dead, but now in the 1980s Zimmer gets a letter from his wife, saying that Mann is alive but ailing in New Mexico and would like to meet Zimmer before he dies.

I first read this book four years ago, and didn’t enjoy it as much as this time. I thought it was too derivative of his other work then, but now I think it’s brilliant with subtle intertextuality.

David Zimmer was Marco Stanley Fogg’s friend in my favourite Auster book, Moon Palace. I would like more than anything to read the continuing adventures of Fogg. This will have to do for now. One tantalising reference to the events of that book is the fact that Zimmer named one of his sons ‘Marco’. No more is said than this, but it put a smile on my face.

The rest of the intertextuality is only now being revealed. Auster published this novel in 2002, but it contains references to works he has completed since. [Spoiler alert] In New Mexico, Mann has spent years making films no-one else is allowed to see, films which his wife will destroy on his death. One of them has the title Travels in the Scriptorium; another, The Inner Life of Martin Frost. The first, of course, is the title of Auster’s 2007 novel; the second of the film he released this year.

Zimmer gives us a scene by scene breakdown of The Inner Life of Martin Frost, the only secret film of Mann’s he gets to see before they are destroyed. I’ll find it interesting to compare with the ‘real’ film of that name.

The threat of the destruction of these amazing secret films makes the whole novel feels like a tragedy at times. Auster reveals something in me, because I managed to feel like the novel had a happy ending when the films might be saved at the end, even after the sad death of Alma, Freida, Hector and possibly David.

None of the writers particularly liked the question, and it was amusing to see them deconstruct it. Lanagan and Kinsella were both amusingly opinionated. I liked Kinsella’s rabble-rousing excitability and his earnest ideology – ‘I am a vegan pacifist anarchist’ – but it didn’t go down well with the older book-club set sitting near me.

Auster was brilliant. He said there was only one truly subversive thing – clarity. And I agree with him entirely. I love clarity too, a transparent book where the words aren’t calling attention to themselves but you’ve just found yourself immersed in the narrative world. It’s what’s similar about Auster and my second favourite writer, Ian McEwan.

Auster said at one point ‘I live in such a solitary world. I’m just trying to do my work. I don’t have an awareness of the literary world.’ He talked of his indifference to critics and fame and I thought of his years living ‘hand to mouth’ working on translations and starving. For him, writing is about one person talking to another, two strangers meeting in intimacy. Well, I’m a stranger to him, but he’s not a stranger to me.

Auster’s only rule : ‘swift and lean’. He said profound things on the spur of the moment in answering questions and he was private yet generous. He didn’t want to be there, but he was making the most of it and delighting me.

I did not have a coffee with Paul Auster. I did not shake hands with Paul Auster. I didn’t even really have a conversation with him. But I went to Adelaide and heard him speak (I was just out of the tent in the sun and he was very small but distinguishable) and he was wise, cynical yet generous, amusing and weathered, just as I imagined and hoped for.

And I did exchange a few words with him.

I was waiting in the autograph line wondering what I could say to a man who I had spent so many hours with and who had been so important to me. In the end the exchange went like this:

What happened then? Did he move onto the next person or did I walk away, spoiling a promising opening because there were a thousand people behind me waiting in the hot sun? I don’t know.

The reality is that you can’t hope to know a writer in ‘real life’ with any of the intimacy or depth that you know him or her through their books. It’s just not possible. It’s the wonder of reading and writing. Auster even said something to this effect at some stage, or I think he did.

There was a time when I would have thought of a witty or controversial or brilliant question to ask and I would have asked it, and I would have waited by the tent for hours, and I would have pushed my way into talking to Auster. But I’m 27 now, as of yesterday, and I’m old and shy. I’m mistrustful of people who push their way forward and I’m sick of egos.

I was glad I went, because I had to and because I enjoyed it, and yet it was in an important sense exactly as I feared.